Sapolsky why are humans unique

By Alun Anderson. Human life: not so much linear as a network of possibilities. And everywhere the writing is informed by his vast, world-leading knowledge of baboon behaviour. His opening chapter looks inside your brain during the second before you do something, be it good or bad.

Here you learn to be fluent in a new way of thinking, seeing behaviour as something modulated by interactions between amygdala, hippocampus, insula and, most important, the subregions of the frontal cortex, which try to plan and control.

We zoom out to ever-wider horizons: past the outer and inner sensations that affect you in the minutes before a decision, past the hormonal states that operate over hours to days, and on to the extraordinary plasticity of the brain, which allows change over days to months.

Pull back again, through childhood and adolescence, the influence of the genes you inherit, the centuries of culture which affect how you categorise the world, and out to our primate relatives, where we witness the evolutionary pressures shaping our ways of thinking and feeling. Hierarchy, obedience, morality, the hidden perils of empathy, free will, evil and criminality, war and peace are all here. You may view testosterone, for example, as the male hormone that boosts aggression.

Seconds before our action, it is neuroscience that investigates what is going on in the brain; minutes to days before is the domain of endocrinology hormonal fluctuations. Sapolsky goes back through adolescence, childhood and gestation including genetics , and, beyond the birth of the individual, to more distant causes still — those found in culture, evolutionary psychology, game theory and comparative zoology. He makes the book consistently entertaining, with an infectious excitement at the puzzles he explains, and wry dude-ish asides.

This book is a miraculous synthesis of scholarly domains, and at the same time laudably careful in its determination to point out at every step the limits of our knowledge. Sapolsky offers a vivid account of a standard view before lining up complications or objections to it from other research, particularly in brain science.

Testosterone, for example, does not cause aggression but amplifies pre-existing tendencies for or against it. Along the way there are many counterintuitive ideas and stern lessons. Income inequality is concretely causally bad for the health of the poorer. There is a well-established link between rightwing authoritarianism and lower IQ. More thorny is the point at which he comes to address the question of individual choice and responsibility. He eventually nails his colours to the mast of strict determinism: every human action is inescapably caused by preceding events in the world, including events in the brain.

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